Category: Games

Here is his home page.  He has been at Stanford Business School since 1964, and born in Geneva, Nebraska.  Here is his personal website.  Here is his Wikipedia page.  He has a doctorate in business administration from Harvard, but actually no economics Ph.D. (bravo!)  Here is the Nobel designation.

Most of all Wilson is an economic theorist, doing much of his most influential work in or around the 1980s.  He is a little hard to google (no, he did not work with Philip Glass), but here are his best-cited papers.  To be clear, he won mainly for his work in auction theory and practice, covered by Alex here.  But here is some information about the rest of his highly illustrious career.

He and David Kreps wrote a very famous paper about deterrence.  Basically an incumbent wishes to develop a reputation for being tough with potential entrants, so as to keep them out of the market.  This was one of the most influential papers of the 1980s, and it also helped to revive some of the potential intellectual case for antitrust activism.  Here is Wilson’s survey article on strategic approaches to entry deterrence.

Wilson has a famous paper with Kreps, Milgrom, and Roberts.  They show how a multi-period prisoner’s dilemma might sustain cooperating rather than “Finking” if there is asymmetric information about types and behavior.  This paper increased estimates of the stability of tit-for-tat strategies, if only because with uncertainty you might end up in a highly rewarding loop of ongoing cooperation.  This combination of authors is referred to as the “Gang of Four,” given their common interests at the time and some common ties to Stanford.

His 1982 piece with David Kreps on “sequential equilibria” was oh so influential on game theory, here is the abstract:

We propose a new criterion for equilibria of extensive games, in the spirit of Selten’s perfectness criteria. This criterion requires that players’ strategies be sequentially rational: Every decision must be part of an optimal strategy for the remainder of the game. This entails specification of players’ beliefs concerning how the game has evolved for each information set, including information sets off the equilibrium path. The properties of sequential equilibria are developed; in particular, we study the topological structure of the set of sequential equilibria. The connections with Selten’s trembling-hand perfect equilibria are given.

Here is a more readable exposition of the idea.  This was part of a major effort to figure out how people actually would play in games, and which kinds of solution concepts economists should put into their models.  I don’t think the matter ever was settled, and arguably it has been superseded by behavioral and computational and evolutionary approaches, but Wilson was part of the peak period of applying pure theory to this problem and this might have been the most important theory piece in that whole tradition.

From Wikipedia:

Wilson’s paper “The Theory of the Syndicates,”JSTOR 1909607 which was published in Econometrica in 1968 influenced a whole generation of students from economics, finance, and accounting. The paper poses a fundamental question: Under what conditions does the expected utility representation describe the behavior of a group of individuals who choose lotteries and share risk in a Pareto-optimal way?

Link here, this was a contribution to social choice theory and fed into Oliver Hart’s later work on when shareholder unanimity for a corporation would hold.  It also connects to the later Milgrom work, some of it with Wilson, on when people will agree about the value of assets.

Here is Wilson’s book on non-linear pricing: “What do phone rates, frequent flyer programs, and railroad tariffs all have in common? They are all examples of nonlinear pricing. Pricing is nonlinear when it is not strictly proportional to the quantity purchased. The Electric Power Research Institute has commissioned Robert Wilson to review the various facets of nonlinear pricing.”  Yes, he is a business school guy.  Here is his survey article on electric power pricing, a whole separate direction of his research.

Here is his 1989 law review article about Pennzoil vs. Texaco, with Robert H. Mnookin.

Wilson also did a piece with Gul and Sonnenschein, laying out the different implications of various game-theoretic conjectures for the Coase conjecture, namely the claim that a durable goods monopolist will end up having to sell at competitive prices, due to the patience of consumers and their unwillingness to buy at higher prices.

Wilson was the dissertation advisor of Alvin E. Roth, Nobel Laureate, and here the two interview each other, recommended.  Excerpt:

Wilson: As an MBA student in 1960, I wrote a class report on how to bid in an auction that got a failing grade because it was not “managerial.”

And here is an Alvin Roth blog post on the prize and the intellectual lineage.

The bottom line?  If you are a theorist, Stockholm is telling you to build up some practical applications  — at the very least pull something out of your closet and sell it on eBay!  A lot of people thought Roberts and maybe Kreps would be in on this Prize, but they are not.  The selections themselves are clearly deserving and have been “in play” for many years in the Nobel discussions.  But again, we see the committee drawing clear and distinct lines.

Let’s see what they do next year!

I just finished watching one of Chess24.com’s Magnus Carlsen-affiliated rapid on-line chess tournaments, when today (a day later?) I see that another tournament has started.  And with Magnus himself playing, as well as other world-class players.  Note that Magnus both plays in these tournaments as the #1 attraction, and he owns an equity share in them, albeit with other investors.

So I’ve been trying to model the production of chess services in my mind.

I start with the point that viewers care much more about live, fresh games than games from a week ago.  Many sports of course operate on this same basis.

The second point is that most chess players have a relatively low opportunity cost of time, Rogoff and Kasparov excepted, plus some chess players can substitute into poker for profit (and may have quit chess already).  In fact what they do in their spare time is to…play chess!  Often with each other, and often on-line.  So if you offer to pay them some amount for doing basically the same, they will sign up.  Especially during a pandemic when many of them are trapped under relatively severe quarantines.

It is also the case that a chess player can play many days in the year, perhaps not every day, but you really can play a lot without tearing your rotator cuff.

It then seems the equilibrium is a much higher supply of chess tournaments, especially since on-line play removes some of the previous barriers to entry, such as needing a venue and some physical infrastructure.

You might even end up with a kind of Malthusian equilibrium, where the supply keeps on expanding to meet a fairly low marginal cost.

But this is a “superstars” kind of competition, and so the returns will go to the scarce factor.  That scarce factor is Carlsen himself, who garners far more attention than any other player.  And as noted he is an equity holder in this venture and as a player he has been winning the #1 prize money.  Over time, you might expect the returns of some of the other players — maybe in the top ten but not so famous or glamorous — to approach the Malthusian level.  Perhaps much of the public doesn’t care if Magnus plays #9 or #16, who in any case are only a small number of rating points apart.

Notice how well Magnus Carlsen understands reputation and internet production.  He keeps on posting “Banter Blitz” videos on YouTube, which show him playing speed chess on-line and commenting on the games as they proceed.  He dramatically expanded the supply of chess tournaments, which he earns income from.  He already was “the scarce factor,” and he has dramatically expanded the supply of attention aimed his way.  He understands that successful internet production is frequent production.

On-line chess viewing is way up (NYT) with the pandemic, and also because of these efforts.

Do not underestimate Magnus Carlsen.  He has been #1 in classical chess, rapid, and blitz, all at the same time.  He is a huge YouTube star in chess.  He has won a tournament about chess trivia, and he has been #1 in fantasy football for the whole world (not an easy feat).

And now he is bringing an economic revolution to chess, with himself as the #1 labor and equity earner at the same time.

My last Bloomberg column was co-authored with Garry Kasparov, here is one excerpt:

Another positive sign for UBI is that most Americans seem keen to return to their workplaces. One fear has been that UBI would lead to a couch-potato culture, with people choosing to stay at home even when they’re finally able to leave. But blue-collar service workers are continuing to brave the front lines even when faced with reasonably high risks of infection. They are not trying to get fired so they can collect unemployment. White-collar workers, meanwhile, are feeling restless and unproductive. Working from home may become more common, but most people seem eager to get back to the office — especially if the alternative is a combination workplace/schoolhouse.

And:

…the crisis is serving up a very different and inferior bargain than the one many original UBI supporters advocated. Institutionalizing emergency measures designed to respond to Covid-19 would be irresponsible. It would entrench UBI without the prerequisite productivity boom from artificial intelligence and automation. (For some time it appeared the opposite might happen — namely, an AI boom but no UBI.)

I can report that Garry was a real pleasure to work and co-author with.  Here is my earlier Conversation with him.